Shazam surprised almost all Windows Phone users by suddenly coming back from the dead (in terms of WP development) and releasing a new version for WP8 devices. Adobe Reader has been around for WP7 for even longer than Shazam, so there wasn’t much reason for anyone to really hope for a WP8-exclusive update of the app. Thankfully though, the update has arrived, and although it isn’t hugely different from the Mango variant of the app, there are some things that might make the new Adobe Reader for Windows Phone a permanent fixture on many devices. The app can open and save PDFs from a number of sources including email, Office, Internet Explorer and even some third-party apps. You can also view password-protected files in Adobe Reader – something that has caused issues for Windows Phone users in the past. The app’s search capabilities and page viewer are pretty decent as well.

PDF files added to a WP8 via USB go to the Office hub by default, but opening them in Adobe Reader doesn’t take much of an effort. You just have to tap the file once, and Reader picks it up from there automatically. PDFs that you find while surfing the web also get opened and saved automatically in the app. Adobe Reader has a separate section for files that have been recently opened, while your entire collection of PDFs is available in the ‘documents’ area.

The page viewer in Adobe Reader is pretty decent, and has a neat interface. The buttons and scroll bar disappear whenever you don’t touch the screen for a few seconds. The top bar has buttons for closing the document, performing a search or changing the scrolling mode. The bottom bar can be used to browse through the document, and if you long-press it, a thumbnail preview of upcoming pages shows up.

Adobe Reader lets its users place bookmarks on any page they are reading. The button located in the bottom-right corner of the viewer can be used for this purpose. If the PDF file doesn’t consist solely of scanned pages, you can search through it for any particular word or phrase. Of course, the text can be copied to clipboard as well.

Adobe Reader for WP8 supports two viewing modes: continuous and single page. The first mode presents all the pages of a document in an unbroken stream, letting you scroll through them using the bottom bar. The second mode shows the complete page in one view.

Password-protected PDFs and sticky notes can both be handled by Adobe Reader. The app is also capable of opening any URLs embedded within documents.

If you were expecting Adobe to add something extra to the mix with the big WP8 update of Reader, you might be disappointed, but the app is pretty decent if you just need a nice solution for managing and viewing PDFs on your Windows Phone. The new app works only with WP8 and doesn’t cost anything.